The Artist

Lise Patt is a visual researcher, educator, and founder of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a peripatetic visual think tank currently headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. For over 25 years, she has treated collaboration as her primary ‘art medium,’ utilizing its principles and practices in the development of two non-profits and in ongoing projects such as Traumbagger, The Manual of Lost Ideas and the AIDS Chronicles, all of which explore entrenched technologies that operate in the gaps between visual and written sign systems. She has written and lectured on museum projects that push at the edges of traditional display paradigms including the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles and Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s multi-sited ‘museum interventions. She is the editor of Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald (2007) and Benjamin’s Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura (2001). With collaborators, through travels, and without photographs she is currently building a post-Barthesian and post-Peircian theory of photography that begins with dust and includes (but does not end with) film.